Man on a Mission: Volunteer Dan Blank is bringing social media to a Harlem school

Dan Blank and the newspaper staff of PS 123

“My initial thought was to have a strong focus on new media, social media, blogs, the whole deal,” says Blank, director of content strategy and development for Reed Business Information (School Library Journal’s parent company), who’s been a regular volunteer at P.S. 123 for the past five years. “It hasn’t really worked that way. It’s been more about supporting their writing. A lot of what I’ve seen are the challenges with [the technology].”

For starters, students in the newspaper program share just one working computer, a Dell PC—not the best for supporting a new media strategy. The school has a computer lab with 32 PCs that the K–7 students share, but it’s for regular class work and not extra-curriculars.

That’s not to say that Blank hasn’t persevered. He’s built a Web site ps123today.com and created a Twitter account (@ps123today). But the student-led viral community he imagined with kids tweeting updates on stories and posting pieces directly online has yet to materialize. “A lot of this has been a learning process,” he says.

A technology supporter, Beverly Lewis, PS 123’s principal, is currently seeking grants and sponsors to launch a 1-to-1 laptop program for her grade three to seven classes starting next fall. In the meantime, every seventh grader is signed up for a Gmail account for homework use, and the school just received a three-year grant to train teachers in how to use social networking in the classroom. “In order to have our students prepared for the 21st century, they must be trained and know how to use a computer across all grade levels,” says Lewis. “Like they use a pen, they should be able to use a laptop.”

Still, the hoops faced by volunteers, like Blank, who doesn’t have children of his own, are many. It takes time to build a Web site, and teachers are allocated to, well, teaching. Moreover, students have only a few hours a week to work on a newspaper, in addition to their other class work. So the details for launching and maintaining new programs, like a school newspaper, fall on volunteers. Even dedicated ones like Blank must cope with constraints on their own time, as well. But he remains encouraged.

Students at P.S. 123 have readily taken to technology. For example, Boubacar Bah, a seventh grader, came up with an idea for his newspaper story on study groups by asking friends on Facebook where they were having the most trouble in school—and what would help. Another seventh-grade student, Elisandro Rosario, uses Twitter and plans to post updates on poems and stories he publishes in the paper.

For now, though, Blank is focused on getting the paper out this year, maybe bringing a friend in to do the layout, and then spending the summer looking at how to tackle online plans for the 2010–2011 school year.

“Doing it as one person is incredibly challenging,” he says. “It’s not off the table for the future for a social Twitter community. But part of this is balancing. I want this to be sustained, and I think I have to get more volunteers.”